Posted on August 19, 2008 at 9:16 am
Well, the box running dotblag.com, while plenty serviceable, is showing it’s age. I’ve ordered a pretty large machine (just short of $3000 in total parts) and the bits are on their way, woohoo! I’ll be setting it up and burning it in over the next month or two. Once it’s ready dotblag will be moving [...]
Posted on July 25, 2008 at 5:26 pm
While it’s not clear exactly who-is-causing what, what is clear is the areca driver tries to de-reference a NULL pointer, this is either because the adapter screws up, or the driver screws up somewhere. The result is a Solaris kernel fault, pointing at the arcmsr driver, and apparently an adapter lockup. It’s not 100% clear [...]
Posted on July 21, 2008 at 11:04 pm
Ordered two racks, received two racks. One is a rhombus though. The bottom part was caved in. *sigh* sending that one back.
In other news it’s been busy, things are starting to happen for our office move. If the damaged rack is still here tomorrow (looks like it will be) I’ll update this entry with a [...]
Posted on July 2, 2008 at 4:06 pm
I find myself realizing I’ll have to go probably to a fabric store to get some velcro tape. Why? To attach the RAID battery backup module in a 1U chassis. Why can’t they just include some of this with them?
Posted on February 18, 2008 at 10:56 pm
OK If you’re a hardware designer, or embedded systems engineer/designer, make sure when you design your flash process to be customer recoverable. Bad flash’s happen. Also, blade manufacturers, other activity on the management module, shouldn’t interrupt a flash process. Looks like I’ll be returning an Intel SBXD132 due to a fragged SMP (System Management Processor — Embedded management module) that [...]
Posted on February 15, 2008 at 1:34 am
Some days it’d be nice to be a cockroach, life would be simpler that’s for sure. So in a previous post I mentioned the trials of getting an ARC-1280ML working with 16+ drives in JBOD. We’ve decided to go with a pair of the same controller, less ports the ARC-1231ML. Hopefully they’ll fix the limitation [...]
Posted on February 15, 2008 at 1:33 am
Just plugged in a couple new (yes I know discontinued) Intel SBXD132’s. Naturally, BIOS and Embedded Management (SMP) is code is out of date, 1.06 is current, 1.04 is installed, and I’m not entirely sure about the SMP version numbers. Flash the BIOS uneventfully, then, go to flash the SMP. SMP nearly completes, taking it’s [...]
Posted on February 14, 2008 at 9:03 pm
As our new SysAdmin is fond of saying, No Whammies! The aforementioned afflicted Supermicro PDSMI+ SYS-5015M-T+B chassis is now in one piece slogging through burn-in testing thanks to one VERY helpful comment.
Posted on February 13, 2008 at 8:05 pm
I have to say thanks to mickrussom because he gave me the heads up/answer as to WHY our Supermicro PDSMI+ system wasn’t working. Turns out the Intel 3000 north bridge ONLY supports up to 1066MHZ FSB speeds, despite the specifications on Supermicro’s site clearly claiming “Supports a Dual-Core Intel® Xeon® 3000 Series processor” — Their emphasis, not mine, [...]
Posted on February 13, 2008 at 10:04 am
This one is shorter than usual. Things have been busy but I wanted to muse on this, because, thankfully, I didn’t get bit by it.
Linux 2.6.17 to about 2.6.24.1 or so has a nice little bug in the vmsplit syscall, wherein it fails to validate parameters. Thus, one can get root. Well I set about [...]
The resident lunatech.